Here’s a very short screencast about vertical text editing feature in TextMate. I often have the case that I need to edit text in several lines at onces. I’m used to do that in the Unix editor VIM but TextMate has this feature as well. For as a keyboard/console junkie it wasn’t easy to figure out how to achieve it in TextMate. That’s why I made this little screencast to share my findings

Everyone hates the time tracking for projects. But everyone also knows that it’s essential for good accounting an planning. The reasons for the dislike is mostly the ugly tools for this tasks. Most tools are good examples for complete lack of user friendlyness

But thanks to brave Julia Soergel & Sebastian Munz there is an alternative. The wrote there diploma thesis on mite – a web based time keeping tool – and released or continued it as a service on the web.

They used all the recent Web 2.0 techniques to create lean, smart and powerfull web application. But they didn’t stop there. They also implemented some additional tools like the Jabber bot and Twitter bot to interact with your mite account.

This makes time keeping really easy and almost a pleasure. So there are no more excuses.

I’ve create a Channel on Vimeo for our screencasts. This is for you to get easily access to all the mac centric screencasts from us.

I create most of the screencasts with ScreenFlow from Telestream. This is a commercial screencasting software for the MacOS X. It has almost all of the features I need and the workflow is pretty fast and snappy. It records the screencast in an intermediate format. After recording you can select the cropping, zooming and other features of the screen record. You can activate audible mouse klicks and additional text captions, videos, audio recordings etc.
Only drawback in the current release is the slow export. Screenflow doesn’t use all the available CPU power to encode the screencast and thus taking longer to export as needed. But this seems to be a bug and will be fixed in a future release.

There is a new star in internet music television called putpat.tv. This is the new service of the guys from Televised Revolution who created MotorTV. But putpat.tv is more than just a music video station. It’s spiced up with interactivity and prefedined channels.

During first login you select you personal music taste by giving some examples of artists or genres you like. Putpat.tv will create a channel with a music mix based on this data and add some other artists you may like.
It’s based on Flash and will start using your whole browser window to playback. This is very clean and simple.

With the “veequalizer” you can modify the mix of your music channel. Simply enter artists and/or genres and adjust the slider.

If you’re tired of your channel you can choose between a dozen of predefined channels with all varieties of music mixes. The channels are displayed in a nice cover flow like view.

All together putpat.tv is a stylish and dead simple way to play your favourite music videos from the web. You quickly get what you want when you’re using these kind of services – good music. I was suprised that I found a lot of music videos from my favourite artists I didn’t knew before. All this slightly reminds me of the good old times when the early MTV (from UK with legendary Ray Cokes, Steve Blame etc….) was constanly playing in the background in my room. I would like to have a separate PC to display putpat.tv in the office

You’ve already heard about the MacOS X Exposé functionality. This is where you can activate the display of either all open program windows, all windows of the active program or the desktop. You can even activate the screen saver or hibernate mode of the display. All these functions can be activated by function key or by moving the mouse pointer into a so called “active corner”.

During normal work you may enter the active corners accidently from time to time. This is a little annoying but the ingenious Apple engineers have already implemented a cure for this itch. You can add modifier keys to the active corners. To trigger the active corners function you now have to press the modifier key while moving the mouse pointer into the corner. No more accidently activation from now one. You have even assign different modifier keys to different corners. But you can’t overload an active corner with multiple modifier keys

How it works show this little screencast. Although the audio is in german you should get the idea how the modifier keys can be set in the system preferences.

This time I show you a nice little drawing application for kids. Doozla comes from the makers of Skitch at plasq.com and is a easy and funny application to draw and colour with for your kids. It’s not just a drawing application like Scribbles but instead offers 4 major modes of drawing. Simple drawing on a plain white ground, coloring pre sketched drawings, draw on a background or take pictures from your iSight and draw on the picture.